You know how Google beat out Microsoft with a $3.1 billion bid for online advertising company DoubleClick? Yeah, Microsoft don't need to stinkin' DoubleClick. They went out and spent $6 billion this morning on their own advertising company (that you've never heard of), aQuantive.

According to Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch, aQuantive's revenues for 2006 were $442 million, and the company's net income was about $54 million, which leads to the obvious question: couldn't Microsoft have found a cheaper advertising company to acquire? Sure, everybody wants to pick up an advertising company these days so it can be integrated into your search engine/online portal's business model. But $6 billion is a lot of dough.

In fact, Microsoft paid about $66 per share, which was twice the trading price. Odds are there was a bidding war and the company didn't want to lose another one of those.